Lattimer Massacre: Immigrant Miners Gunned Down

A sheriff's posse opened fire on a crowd of unarmed immigrant coal miners marching peacefully on a public road near Lattimer, Pennsylvania, on September 10, 1897, killing 19 men and wounding at least 36 others, most of them shot in the back as they tried to flee. The Lattimer Massacre was one of the bloodiest episodes in the history of American labor, and nearly all the victims were recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, Slavic and Lithuanian miners who had walked off the job to protest wage discrimination and the practice of requiring miners to use company-owned stores. The miners, roughly 400 strong, were marching from the town of Harwood to the Lattimer mine to persuade workers there to join their strike. They carried no weapons and had an American flag at the head of their column. Luzerne County Sheriff James Martin, accompanied by a posse of about 150 deputies recruited from the local English-speaking population, confronted the marchers at the edge of Lattimer. Martin ordered the miners to disperse, and when they attempted to walk around the posse, the deputies began firing without warning. The shooting lasted less than two minutes. The miners had been striking against conditions that were brutally exploitative even by the standards of the Gilded Age. Mining companies paid immigrant workers significantly less than native-born Americans for the same work, deducted fees for tools, powder, and medical care, and required purchases at company stores where prices were inflated. The miners had no union representation and no legal recourse; the companies owned the houses they lived in and could evict striking workers and their families on a day's notice. Sheriff Martin and 73 deputies were charged with murder but acquitted by a jury of English and Irish Americans who shared the widespread prejudice against the newer immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe. The acquittal outraged immigrant communities across the coal regions and became a powerful recruiting tool for the United Mine Workers of America. The Lattimer Massacre is credited as the single event that most accelerated the unionization of the anthracite coal fields, transforming what had been a fragmented workforce of competing ethnic groups into a unified labor movement that would win major concessions in the great anthracite strikes of 1900 and 1902.